Kermit Roosevelt – Allegiance

November 16, 2015 – Today, we travel back 75 years to a dark period of the Second World War. But the battlefield where liberty and tyranny clash isn’t Midway or Normandy Beach. It’s the hallowed halls of the United States Supreme Court. Our guide into this world is Kermit Roosevelt. His novel is Allegiance, a legal thriller built around the internment of Americans with Japanese ancestry — 62% of them American citizens — under Franklin Roosevelt’s infamous Executive Order 9066.

Kermit Roosevelt happens to be distantly related to FDR through his great-great grandfather, Theodore Roosevelt. He’s also a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, winner of the Philadelphia Athenaeum Literary Award for his previous novel, In the Shadow of the Law, and a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice David Souter.